Fellow Shimmy - The Savior to your Sad Grinder

Shimmy is here to save the day

If you’re anything like me, you’re on a journey towards brewing better coffee at home.

There are so many variables that contribute to how your coffee tastes when you’re brewing it by hand, but one of, if not the most influential variable is your grind size. And not just your grind size, but your grind particle distribution - how even your coffee is ground.

Here’s why - the process of brewing coffee, or dissolving the coffee solids into the finished beverage you’re about to consume, is called extraction. To extract coffee well, you have to expose the beans to water. That’s why we grind coffee. Now, you can grind coffee with a burr grinder, and blade grinder, heck - even a mortar and pestle would work.

But do they all work as well?

Grinding your coffee with a mortar and pestle would be laborious at best and downright silly at worst. That’s why we use machines to grind our coffee. Burr grinders tend to make the best work of grinding coffee, crushing the beans and often resulting in a rather even grind size. Blade grinders chop the beans instead, usually yielding a less than even distribution.

But here’s the thing - although burr grinders are a preference, they’re often a privilege.

The average burr grinder starts at a few hundred dollars, compared to a blade grinder that you can find second hand for a few bucks. Most people want a burr grinder, but few people have them. Grinding with a cheaper grinder is going to yield an uneven particle size, producing a lot of fines or microfines that will result in clogging brews and coffee that tastes either bitter or unevenly extracted.

This is where Shimmy comes in.

Shimmy is a small, inexpensive coffee sieve from Fellow Products that shakes out all of the fine particles (200μm or smaller) and leaves you with only the good stuff. This will help to reduce the over extraction caused by those fine particles, and regulate the grind particle distribution of any grinder.

So whether you’re currently saving up for a burr grinder for yourself, camping in the wilderness, at an AirBNB using whatever you can find, or trying to brew at your parents with their ancient spice grinder, Shimmy can improve the performance of whatever grinder you’re working with.

Here are some notable features:

• Assembled, Shimmy kind of looks like a cocktail shaker. And that’s exactly how it’s intended to work. You simply grind your coffee with whatever you have available to you, place your ground coffee in here, snap on the lid and shake. The fine etched metal filter will sieve out all of the microfines and leave only the most even particles in this chamber. That’s the good stuff.

• You’ll notice a denominator on the fine etched filter that reads “200μm”. A micron is a unit of measurement that’s short for micrometer, equal to one-millionth of a meter. Since the metric system is very rational, there are 1,000 microns in a millimeter and 10,000 microns in a centimeter. Grind particles that measure 200 microns or less are a little too fine for our pour over setup, and don’t taste all that good. Anything less than 200 microns will be filtered out during the shimmying and shaking of your new friend.

• All of the components are easy to clean - the body and filter can go in the top rack of your dishwasher and the lid and bottom cap just need to be rinsed by hand.

The test

To prove its proficiency, I brewed two identical coffees - one that I sieved with Shimmy and that I didn’t. I picked up a used blade grinder for the purpose of this test, as they are notoriously terrible at evenly grinding coffee.

What I expected to observe is a longer brew time - maybe even some stalling - on the coffee that doesn’t get sieved, and a cup that tastes bitter or feels muddy. The sieved coffee with Shimmy I presumed would brew smoothly and taste as good as I hoped.

In short, that’s exactly the experience I had. The non-sieved coffee had a burnt aroma, reminded me of wet cardboard, and left an unpleasant aftertaste on my palate. The sieved coffee however had a pleasant scent to the nose, was sweet and balanced to taste, and left me with a lingering sensation for more.

Is Shimmy for you?

Well if you have a decent to good grinder, save your money for something else like coffee - buy some more coffee.

But if a burr grinder is still on your wishlist and you don’t have a few hundred dollars to invest, a small investment in Shimmy will surely help to bridge that gap and make better tasting coffee out of the gear you currently have.